Life without negatives
OK, let’s be honest, that’s never really going to happen. Something will go wrong once in a while, there’s nothing you can do about it.
What you can do, however, is control your reaction to whatever it is.
If you dwell on the negative, it increases in size, it takes priority in your day. It takes up mental energy that you can better use for something worthwhile.
One trick is to look for the silver lining in the dark cloud.
Example: Last night, I went to bed about the usual time… but then the alarm on my phone went off just before midnight (stupid setting on my part). Then I woke up again just after midnight from some kind of bizarre dream about samurai style sword fighting. My old method would have been to lie in bed, perhaps doze a little, then get up when my alarm goes of and be tired all day. Worse than being tired, I’d probably dose up on caffeine as well, which makes me feel alert for a while, but also slightly queasy(when consumed in large quantities), and be complaining about how tired I am all day (mostly not verbalising it, I’m not that bad… but the voices inside my head, they complain a lot), and end up feeling more tired, getting less done, and feeling justified in basically being useless all day.
Today, I got up (not straight away, but still, sooner than I would have), and instead of dwelling on how tired I felt,started my morning meditation a bit earlier, did some reading, a little bit of writing (this, in fact), and generally got my day off to an earlier start than usual. After I finish this, my usual day will start, and I’ll be humming along like normal.
Some negatives don’t have a silver lining - there’s not a lot you can do about that. What you can do, however is simply move past the event. Deal with the consequences, and put it aside. Beating yourself up over it, or revisiting it in your mind only helps keep you in a negative ‘flow’, and if you’re anything like me, those can go on for a couple of days.
Today, I’ve got a new little voice in my head. It’s the one that shouts “get over it!” at the other ones when they start complaining about feeling a little tired. I’ll see how that works out for me.
CommentsLife without TV.
I don’t like watching TV. It’s inefficient, annoying, and a mammoth time sink.
I do, however, like watching certain TV shows.
An hour long TV show has around 40 minutes of actual content in it. The rest is ads, station promos, credits, and sundry other cruft that I feel is a waste of my time.
I’m also not a fan of having to sit around and wait for broadcast shows to come on at a particular time, on a particular day (and I know this objection goes away for those of you in Tivo enabled parts of the world). Nor am I a fan of waiting for the show to hit the part of the world I’m in, having to avoid any mention of it online in case I get smacked in the face with a spoiler.
In short, broadcast TV is dead to me. It’s inconvenient and annoying. It exists to serve advertisers, not me, and I spurn it as I would spurn a rabid dog.
What’s my solution?
I watch TV on my schedule. In my case, I download it using bittorrent, but depending on where you live there may be better (or at least, more legal) options.
Just for the record, this isn’t because I’m cheap. I’d happily pay a subscription fee of some sort (lets say, roughly equivalent to cable charges) to someone if I could download legitimately… but I can’t, because no such facility exists. I can and do buy TV show boxed sets on DVD (some of which go unopened, as I’ve already watched the whole series; I buy them purely for the sake of giving something back to the creators).
Now, depending on where you live, you may have better options than we do - but that’s not what this post is about.
If you currently spend 3-4 hours a night in front of the (aptly named) idiot box, imagine how much you could get done with an extra 1000 hours a year.
My plans for these hours over the coming year include (not in priority order):
- Regular posts on this blog (maybe 4-5 hours a week), and routine ‘blog maintenance
- Starting a course of university study, online
- Get my level 50 Warrior to level 70 (Yes, as a matter of fact I do happen to think that computer games are a better use of my time than watching TV)
- Investigating passive and semi-passive income flows
Just as an exercise, I’d like you to spend a few minutes and imagine what you could get done in the next 12 months, if you had an extra thousand waking hours to spend. If I actually have any readers yet (I’m not sure that I do - if I do, hi there!), I’d invite them to comment - either with what you could do with 1000 hours extra in the next 12 months, or just to say hi!
CommentsA Beginning; An Introduction.
Over the last few years, I’ve been experimenting with removing certain things from my life. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that every time I selectively remove something from my life, I learn something about myself, improving my life in some regard.
Some things I remove as a experiment (like my Year Without Fiction). Other things I make a more permanent decision to remove (such as my former friends who were generally negative people to be around, or my nicotine addiction).
Whether the removal is temporary or permanent, I gain from it. I remove something from my life to make my life better in some way.
Recently (late last year) I changed country, and in doing so, shrugged off many of my material possessions, and my life took another step in a great feeling direction.
6 Months before changing country, I shifted my TV into a back room, because I just wasn’t using it. Before I left the country, I gave it away, and I haven’t replaced it.
About a week ago, I finished an exclusionary diet, where I didn’t partake of wheat, dairy, sugar, artificial sugar, caffeine, artificial preservatives, peanuts or orange juice (this was marketed as a Detox Diet, don’t ask me about the rationale for these exclusions). For me it was mostly an attempt to reset some of my attitudes towards food, and has been fairly successful.
I’m looking at my (personal) email no more than a couple of times a day.
I’ve got friends who eschew cooked food (part of the ‘Raw Movement’ that’s gaining momentum and visibility at the moment), friends who are getting rid of their paper books and going 100% electronic for all their reading, friends who avoid stability, staying in one place only long enough to generate sufficient funds to travel again and explore more of the world.
In our modern lives, there’s simply so much… of everything. We can reduce, minimise, remove or avoid much of it and, in doing so, actually improve our quality of life.
That’s what this blog is about.
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